His nebbish visage seems to pop up everywhere–like a “Where’s Waldo?” life-feature. I remember seeing him on CNN, whilst slugging off one last one in an airport lounge before a long plane ride to Asia in the previous century; a year later, Y2K, I would see that same earnest face in-person amidst a sea of notable folk at the DisinfoCon gathering, New York City. The guy has been around forever, before the world had heard of PeeWee Herman, and yet he considers himself a late-bloomer–receiving his Ph.D at age 50.

Students love him; he is as mischievous as they would like to be…and gets paid for it. Author of Present Shock, Douglas Rushkoff teaches us that “the future is now”; that we are in control, if we choose to be, and that a career can be made as a sort of kosher Dennis the Menace.

Todd Brendan Fahey: You have “arrived” in Academia (congratulations!). Over the years you’ve taught adjunct at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and the New School University, and word is you’ve entertained offers from MIT and other Ivy League schools–but your first “real job” as a professor is at Queens College. What kind of “life hacks” are you able to perform on/with your students, now that you have a certain modicum of stability in your role as educator? (For example, I’d probably be focusing on interdisciplinary work involving the cultivation of mushrooms…”legal variety,” of course [and then show the students how to obtain also legal psylocibin spore prints, and then let their minds take off and with a requisite completed short story at the semester’s end]; or, for the more timid class member, how to take advantage of the new micro-distillery laws and freedoms, and with a generous historical readings of “the revenuers v. Appalachian hoots-and-hallows boys.”)

Douglas Rushkoff: I’m not at New School, nor NYU or MIT, because I didn’t want to be sitting in a seminar, staring at kids I’m putting into six figures of debt for a degree. Somehow, it seemed a little hypocritical to be doing teach-ins at Occupy about student debt but then going and creating more of it at an expensive private institution.

So I went to public school – CUNY/Queens. Not even the Graduate Center, but out in the provinces. The beauty of it is that it’s cheap – like Learning Annex prices – but super brilliant colleagues who all have the same approach to this stuff that I do: it’s not about creating some professorial reputation, but making a change in the world and our students’ lives. It’s also a hotbed for radicals and radical thought. It’s where Malcolm X spoke, and where the Mississippi three (the civil rights workers who got killed) came from.

That’s the main hack: stop worrying what people think, ditch brand names, stay out of debt (you can’t even get rid of this stuff by going bankrupt) and – like Timothy Leary said – find the others. That can be the trickiest part – finding your team. It’s like finding your table in the high school cafeteria.

Plus, they are letting me do whatever I want. So I’m starting a new Masters program in Media Studies with an Activist bent. All I did was send out a tweet and dozens of applications came in from around the world, from people looking for something like this. People from Italy, Nigeria, China, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, thinking critically about media and acting purposefully with it. We started a Center for Media Activism, and an Interactive Narrative Lab. All in the first 14 weeks (that’s all it’s been so far!)

So the initial life hack is to get an Ivy quality education without going into debt, and to get right to the meat of what you want to do without jumping through elitist hoops. On a weirder level, some of us are studying the gnostic drive behind technology, and then applying these principles to sigil magick. Or looking at new forms of hacktivism.

But it’s not about me driving them to try or do stuff. It’s me building courses and seminars around what the cohort wants to learn or accomplish.

How have students changed from the time that you were doing the MFA at [the Walt Disney family founded/endowed] California Institute of the Arts–“CalArts,” for anyone living in Los Angeles? That was, from all that I have heard, a pretty footloose place to study, already; but we have The Internet now, with all its attendant instantaneous access and dispersal. What has this done to and for students (besides giving them the ability to txt their girlfriends and boyfriends when you are trying to lecture)?

Well, I was in an acting school at CalArts, getting a degree in theater directing. I think all arts schools are pretty, well, artsy. It was going to Princeton, the seat of young Republicanism and prep school entitlement, that radicalized me. I was the weirdo amongst the normals. But at CalArts I was kind of the normal amongst the weirdos. Until they saw my work, at which point I was welcomed among the freakiest of them. Those were different times. Everybody lived on the campus or nearby, and we were there 24/7 doing our plays, movies, learning Gamelan, watching animation. We had a nude outdoor pool and it was just the way things were. You couldn’t do that today without lawsuits.

I don’t really see the net interfering with students’ work or brains so much. The real problem is how companies want to push colleges to run their operations on the net. There’s one awful platform everyone uses called Blackboard, which is basically a business plan masquerading as education. The more you do online, the harder it is get offline. So if you put a reading up there, that’s cool – but it will be almost impossible to print out or to port somewhere else. It’s like the old roach motels – cockroaches go in but they can’t get out.

So a whole lot of the most subversive and weird parts of education get neutralized and made generic. No better than some online class. When the most dangerous thing about education is people in the room together, just talking and plotting. That’s the original meaning of conspiracy: to breathe together. It’s what Socrates was trying to do, and why they got rid of him in the worst of ways.

In some ways it’s really hard, because schools are so institutionalized, and everyone wants “job skills.” As if there’s really some job they can train for that will still be there. But in some ways it’s easier, because people are so unused to just being together. My undergrads tell me that their courses have all been about absorbing facts, when mine are about challenging those facts, even challenging our own underlying assumptions. So in a landscape where people aren’t questioning a lot, it’s pretty easy to create a sense of rebellion. At CalArts it took PeeWee Herman roller skating through the basement corridors in a dress. It doesn’t take that much anymore; these are much more conservative times.

We are four years apart in age–not a big spread, both Gen-X’ers; we both lived in California, with its permissive culture and plenitude of substances, some of which I trust you are familiar; you got your Master’s at Cal Arts, I at USC…but as I count being published in High Times and VICE as “highlights of my career,” you have been a columnist with the Guardian (UK), have written for Wall Street Journal, featured on “The Colbert Report,” yaddayadda. I mean: “Dude. WTF’s your secret?”

Well, VICE is more the future than the Wall Street Journal, no? I only got my own words in there once, anyway, and they’ve panned all my books as being unrealistic. They said my assertion that there was going to be a mortgage crisis or that anyone on Wall St. was betting against the securities they were selling was outlandish conspiracy theory. I think they let me in there that one time as a way of apologizing for all the unwarranted abuse.

But yeah, it’s been a good ride. I get to make radio, write books and graphic novels, make TV shows. I just have to work really hard, all the time, because things don’t always come at the right time. I’m always doing three things at once, I never go out (really – like never since having a kid), and I’m driven to try to keep humanity from surrendering to digitally amplified industrial capitalism.

If there’s a secret to my success it is being willing to challenge the underlying assumptions of our time, without regard to whether people will agree with it. I used to get laughed out of editors’ offices back when I’d pitch stories about emerging technologies like the Internet. My first book about things cyber was canceled in 1992 because the publisher thought the Internet would be “over” by the 1993 publication date. I took my book Media Virus to maybe 20 publishers until one took a chance on the idea that the media space might be changing. I wrote Life Inc. – the one that got me on Colbert – *before* the economic crisis.

So a lot of it has to do with being right, but more important it’s a matter of having been in the right place at the right time. Not luck, exactly, but going to the places in culture where I thought people were having the most fun, doing the strangest things, or thinking the freshest thoughts. So my California experience ended up being Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. Then the whole rave/cyberdelic scene, Jaron Lanier and VR people, and RU Sirius and Mondo 2000. RU Sirius was my graduate education, really.

The other secret to my success has been the insistence on bringing something “back” from whatever I do. No matter how strange the journey, I make sure I’m still a participant-observer. I wouldn’t even go to a Dead show without also playing cultural anthropologist or mythological interpreter or something. I feel really privileged, so I always ask myself how this experience can provide value to others.

What was the value of Mondo 2000 to you; how would you gauge its imprint on American culture of the time, and why the fuck did it disappear?

Well, it’s history now, but Mondo 2000 covered new technology, science, and social forms before anybody else. Mondo was the first place other than PC Mag or a math journal that you could find out about the emerging net, virtual reality, chaos math, and fractals. And they were all covered from a revolutionary, psychedelic perspective.

The forgotten history of this stuff is that it was built by acid heads. Other than children, people who had taken LSD were the only ones comfortable imagining worlds into reality. They had experience with hallucination. And believe me, building the first virtual worlds – even ones based entirely in text – was akin to hallucinating something into the real world.

The value of Mondo was to anchor these new technologies in something other than the military. That’s all we knew about computers in the early days: they were an artifact of WWII cryptography, or used to calculate missile trajectories. Then Stewart Brand (of the Merry Pranksters and the Acid Tests), he told everyone that these technologies were cool and could augment humanity. So the hippies jumped in.

I learned about this stuff because my most psychedelic friends from college – the ones I was scared might die from overdoses or insanity – they were living out in San Francisco getting jobs at Intel and Northrup. It just didn’t compute. So I went out there to see what computers and freaks had in common. Mondo 2000 was the first and best guide to this overlap.

Then, once the net became accepted, Wired magazine and its libertarian founders came along and recast the whole phenomenon as a business story. They made the net safe for investment, and kind of killed it in the process. Wired – the voice of net business – claimed it was the voice of net culture, and pushed Mondo off the map.

Mondo 2000 was actually the third incarnation of a magazine that was originally called High Frontiers, and then Reality Hackers, as it went from an almost purely psychedelic journal to a really intentional mashup of drugs and computers. “Reality hackers,” like BoingBoing’s “happy mutants,” were people who felt comfortable redesigning reality while they were living it, and by any means necessary. It was a cyberpunk ethos that spanned everything from fantasy role-playing games to smart drugs, body modification to cold fusion.

RU was a really fascinating figure – in some ways the Andy Warhol of this whole cyberdelic circus. People would go up to the old Victorian house in Berkeley Hills where the magazine was written and lived, and basically party with RU and the others. It was a form of pitching, really. I saw people bring new technologies up there, or just share new ideas in the hopes of getting covered in the magazine. But everybody was really high. There was always a new designer drug to be tried, and not all of them were as happy as others.

It was a crazy scene. Tim Leary would pass through, Joichi Ito (now head of MIT Media Lab), Todd Rundgren…tripsters, scientists, mathematicians, technologists. I remember one time where Walter Kirn and I were supposed to be visiting and no one was home, so Walter went and peed off the front porch in the hope of generating a chaotic attractor that would draw RU’s arrival.

Another night I remember getting into a conversation with RU’s girlfriend at the time, who had just had an abortion. She told me how she did the whole thing on acid, because ergot was a traditional purgative.

It was a real scene. At least as real as the Factory or the Pranksters, in that there was a real place, real stakes, and real insanity.

What, in your learned opinion and having been a successful one, should a student be doing these days–both in and out of class?

That depends on the student. I mean, there’re 16-year-olds and 30 year-olds, high school seniors and nuclear physicists getting fourth PhDs.

If I was a successful student, it was because I remained aware of the frame – the cultural assumptions underlying what I was supposed to learn – but then still went ahead and learned the stuff anyway. That’s a big and hard thing to do. So if you see that, say, the English literature you’re being taught all comes from a place of anti-Semiticism or anti-feminism or racism, you can say “fuck this” and fail the course. Or if you see that the science you’re being taught all comes from a really western perspective of industrialization and domination of nature, you can drop out. But what good does that do? Better to maintain the awareness that your teacher, your whole institution may be stuck in a really tight reality tunnel. Stay aware of the fact that the corporate funding they’ve taken has limited what they can even see about the subject they are supposedly teaching you. And then learn from inside that little frame. Learn everything they know, while also figuring out the bigger picture for yourself. And once you really know the things they know – only when you know the things they know – are you in a position to break their boundaries. Punch some holes in their world view. Let some light and air in there. Chances are they will hate you for it, but that’s how you replace them.

Ho ho: My only C’s in mine undergrad [two of ‘em, same semester, same Professor; a study abroad term at University of London] came from “punching some holes” in the agenda of a World Government-focused course; I began interjecting elements of None Dare Call It Conspiracy, and the Rhodes Scholar jerk who taught the courses didn’t like that one bit. >:-(

You wrote very publicly (CNN.com) of your self-escape from Facebook, to–and for many reasons–its intrusion into users’ real-life autonomy and the piling on of users’ so-called innocent “Like”s, in a way which benefit third-party advertisers and of Facebook’s own market scrutinizers. Any regrets?

I suppose so. As a minor public figure, I think my being on Facebook amounts to condoning the platform and their practices. And from everything I know, it’s just really evil shit masquerading as social empowerment. If it was just me that was going to get screwed by the place and its algorithms, I wouldn’t mind. I am pretty tough skinned and resilient at this point. But I don’t think its appropriate for someone who is out there preaching about what amounts to digital hygiene to be subjecting his readers to that stuff. Anybody who “likes” my page can be used in an ad for something associated with me? That’s not fair to them.

In some ways I guess it’s patronizing of me. Shouldn’t my readers be able to take care of themselves? Sure, I guess so. But I don’t like giving tacit approval to the company. And if by not going on there I give a few hundred or thousand other people the courage to say “I don’t need that thing,” so much the better. You know I got a ton of people asking me how I could live without the Internet? They thought leaving Facebook was leaving the net. That’s good enough reason to do it.

Rorschach test question: Edward Snowden

Hero.

]]>CNN: The Russia Hack is Not About Youhttp://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2014/8/6/cnn-the-russia-hack-is-not-about-you.htmlDouglas Rushkoff2014-08-07T00:43:03Z2014-08-07T00:43:03Z

(CNN) -- Most people's first response on hearing that 1.2 billion usernames and passwords have been compromised by a group of Russian hackers? We check our own most important accounts for evidence of misuse, and change our passwords. If a week or two goes by with nothing out of the ordinary happening on our credit cards, we breathe a sigh of relief and go back to life as normal.

In short, if nothing happens to us, personally, then we really don't care.

But that's not how the Internet works. We're all in this thing together, and when the network is compromised, so too are we all.

So what lessons should we take from the news that this cyberposse has managed to break into over 420,000 websites of companies large and small?

First off, your data is not safe -- certainly not in an online universe where it's supposed to be protected by consumer-created passwords and computer-illiterate merchants. Over the years, I have been laughed off more than one panel for suggesting that we won't begin to take digital education seriously until nine Chinese teenagers break into a major Wall Street bank and create such havoc that we're forced to reset the entire economy to yesterday at noon.

So it turns out to be a dozen Russian 20-somethings in a small city near Mongolia, but the achievement was equally spectacular and should provoke an equally widespread response.

Yes, the compromised 420,000 websites belonging to companies large and small need to be reconfigured, but so does our entire approach to information and its security.

In the most immediate and practical sense, we pedestrians have to accept the fact that we are utterly incapable of protecting ourselves on the information superhighway. We don't use good passwords, we use the same ones on multiple sites, we don't change them often enough, and we store them in files and e-mails and other places where they are not secure.

The easy cure is to use a password service such as Dashlane, KeePass or LastPass to create and manage your passwords for you. You can even share passwords securely with others, revoke access, and change passwords regularly without having to remember anything but your own master key.

Likewise, those of us working in businesses simply have to learn to surrender authority of our security to those IT people who keep telling us to do stuff that we ignore. We have to respect the firewalls, scan USB sticks before we stick them in our machines or printers, and not defeat the security protocols they've established for us. They are not the enemy.

It's akin to good collective hygiene. When you don't wash your hands, that's one thing. If you work in a restaurant, it's another. Now that we're all connected digitally, we are all working in the equivalent of a virtual cafeteria, spreading whatever we happen to pick up to everyone else.

That's the vulnerability these Russian kids exploited. They collected all these usernames and passwords through a botnet installed on our computers. That weird file you opened that didn't seem to have anything in it? Or that link you clicked on and the extra window that opened in your browser? That was you installing a piece of malware on your machine -- a tiny program that turned your laptop into part of this tiny hacker group's global supercomputer. Your processor, your contact list, and your access becomes theirs. From there, they just watch and collect.

Basic digital literacy is certainly the best option against these infiltrations. But the first and most important step in that education is to realize that there are people who know how this stuff works better than we do. The scary part of living in a networked world is that we're all responsible for our mutual well-being. But the great part is that there are many people out here willing to help us rise to that challenge.

As long as we see our interests as personal and individual, we will continue to be used as a giant battering ram on the firewalls of banks and other companies on whom we are depending. They can patch and update, but their processing power pales in comparison with that of a few hundred million home computers controlled by a malicious gang.

That bounty of 1.2 billion usernames and passwords likely isn't even the prize they're after; it's merely the platform from which they're going after something else. Until we members of a networked society learn to work together, we will continue to be used by those who put us together for themselves.

]]>Come Study Media and Activism with Me at CUNY/Queenshttp://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2014/5/27/come-study-media-and-activism-with-me-at-cunyqueens.htmlDouglas Rushkoff2014-05-27T12:44:08Z2014-05-27T12:44:08Z

It's official. I'm a university professor - and at a public university where you can all come and study and work and devise the future of civilization for cheap. The official press release is below. The skinny? I've taken my first university post, as a professor of media studies at CUNY/Queens College, where I'll be helping to build a first-of-its-kind media studies program. Instead of training people to become advertisers or to write the next useless phone app (and raise VC), I'm going to support people who want to see through the media, and use it to wage attacks on the status quo. This is media studies for Occupiers.

The undergraduate program is in full swing. The graduate program is accepting applications for Spring. You can take my graduate or undergraduate course, a la carte, beginning THIS FALL (more info below).

This is my answer to the emails I get every week from people asking where they can study media theory and activism. Come and get it.

| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE |

Renowned digital media theorist Douglas Rushkoff joins the faculty of City University of New York’s Queens College, to help develop new master’s in media studies

Queens, NY, May 27, 2014 -- Queens College of the City University of New York announces today that Douglas Rushkoff, the famed cyberculture expert who originated concepts such as “viral media” and “social currency,” will be joining its faculty. This marks the first full-time academic role for the prolific media theorist, award-winning author, and documentarian, who is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the digital age. Starting this August, he will help lead the development of a new Master of Arts in Media Studies program that will address the technological and market forces that dominate our daily lives.

Rushkoff, who holds a PhD in New Media and Digital Culture, is the author of over a dozen best-selling books, the winner of the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, and creator of four award-winning PBS “Frontline” documentaries on the cultural and societal impact of media and the media industry. A regular commentator for CNN, “CBS Sunday Morning,” and NPR, he has shaped current thinking on topics such as corporatism, “digital natives” (another Rushkoff coinage), and distributed solutions to social problems – from Occupy to Bitcoin. His latest book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (2013) – described as “invaluable” by the New York Times – introduced the concept of the always-on “digital present-ism.” His recent PBS documentary Generation Like (2014) explored the influence of social media on youth culture.

Rushkoff’s move to academia reflects his interest in social justice and the need to build media literacy in the rapidly evolving global media environment. “This is a rally for consciousness,” says Rushkoff. “The essential skill in a digital age is to understand the biases of the landscape – to be able to think critically and act purposefully with these tools – lest the tools and companies behind them use us instead.”

“I wish to foster a deeper awareness and more purposeful implementation of media, and this can be best accomplished at a mission-driven public institution such as Queens College,” says Rushkoff, a native of Queens who was inspired to join the school because of its rich legacy of social dialogue and engagement. “I want to teach a diverse range of students without putting them into lifelong debt. Besides, where better to work on media in the people’s interest than a public university?”

“The college, with its unique community of students, creative artists, and scholars, has a tradition of cultivating a learning environment supportive of critical thinking and social consciousness,” adds Media Studies Chair and Professor Richard Maxwell.“Rushkoff’s contributions to current thinking in technology, media, and society are at the forefront of the evolving study of media. He’s a great fit for our program and will complement our existing faculty in providing a transformative learning experience.”

The new master’s program aims to balance the theoretical and applied study of media to question conventional understanding of media technology, content, and audiences. It will rethink the media’s role in urban development, economic justice, political activism, environmental responsibility, public policy and cultural identity. Students will be engaged in project-based learning and highly individualized courses of study.

Says Queens College’s Interim President Evangelos Gizis, “Dr. Rushkoff joins a remarkable community of academics who are providing relevant and thoughtful learning to the next generation. Our success in attracting leading scholars such as Rushkoff is a reflection of the academic excellence that we have cultivated at Queens College.”

“A pioneering media scholar such as Rushkoff joining our faculty helps us fulfill our mission,” notes Dean of Arts and Humanities William McClure. “As a public institution, we’re committed to providing students access to the best education possible irrespective of their socioeconomic status – including access to top thinkers in our nation.”

Rushkoff joins the ranks of acclaimed scholars in emerging areas of study at Queens College, including department chair Maxwell, the co-author of Greening the Media (2012) who is a political economist and expert on cultural consumption and the environmental impact of media technology; and MA program director Mara Einstein, an expert in consumption and cause marketing.

Starting in August, Rushkoff will be teaching courses in propaganda and media theory. He plans to involve students in his continuing work as advisor for the digital literacy platform Codecademy and other New York startups, his books and documentaries, and the relaunch of his radio show, “The Media Squat”, which models open source and collectivist approaches to social and economic challenges.

The new Master of Arts in Media Studies program begins offering courses this August and will welcome its first cohort in Spring 2015.

Both can be taken by matriculated students or non-matriculated students. To register as a non-matriculated student for the graduate course, apply here(they make it look hard but it’s very easy), and then simply email me and I’ll put you in the course.

If you want to take the undergraduate course, Propaganda, as a non-enrolled student, apply here and then email me.

]]>Punching Nerds in the Face is Never a Good Thinghttp://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2014/5/17/punching-nerds-in-the-face-is-never-a-good-thing.htmlDouglas Rushkoff2014-05-17T13:57:20Z2014-05-17T13:57:20Z

(CNN) -- At this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner -- the annual opportunity for the President to engage directly, and humorously, with reporters who cover him -- it was expected that most of the jibes would be aimed at Barack Obama. Sure, he gets the chance to defend himself, but it's pretty much a roast: A leading comedian is invited every year to make jokes, while the commander in chief tries to laugh instead of squirm.

Maybe that's why I was so jolted when this year's headliner, comedian Joel McHale of TV's "The Soup," took such a hard swipe at Google. "America still has amazing technological innovations. Google Glass has hit the markets. Now, just by walking down the street, we'll know exactly who to punch in the face."

It got a pretty good laugh -- perhaps because both the press and the politicians in the room were relieved to have been spared for at least one joke. But the violence of the imagery, and the intensity of the rage that it expressed, gave me serious pause: Are we in the midst of a new kind of tech industry backlash? And is it for something these companies are actually doing, or have they simply lost control of the technology story?

This is more than the traditional sort of commentary and critique of a new form of culture that we've seen waged against everything from television advertising or fashion iconography in the past.

When the artists called Like4Real rebel against the ubiquity of the Facebook "Like" by holding a funeral for the thumbs-up symbol, it comments effectively, if acerbically, on the changing nature of social relationships in a commercial space. Meanwhile, artists from KillYourPhone.com are encouraging people to make special pouches for cell phones and PDAs, which prevent them from receiving signals. Again -- agree with them or not about the need for an occasional digital detox -- it's clever, provocative and memorable satire.

But the notion, even expressed jokingly, of punching people in the face for wearing Google Glass -- as if the device somehow signals a traitor to the cause of humanity -- pushes things over the top. Yes, we can all imagine how people wearing an augmented reality device might be annoying: They can surf the Web while pretending to converse with us or, worse, record us when we don't know it. No sooner had the very first prototypes been spotted last year than TechCrunch reported a new, purely apprehensive moniker for its wearers: Glassholes. But it's as if the public is now being primed to go after early adopters -- almost to a point where one might be reluctant to put on the device.

Are technology companies such as Google shouldering the blame for too much? It seems as if they are bearing responsibility not only for people's fears about the future of technology but the excesses of corporate capitalism.

Consider the hullabaloo now centered on the buses that convey Google employees from San Francisco to Silicon Valley. This winter, protesters waylaid one of the Google shuttles, going so far as to hurl a brick through one of its windows in protest of what they see as the tech giant's gentrifying influence on the city. When San Francisco introduced the new Muni 83X bus line, locals were quick to point out that its sparsely utilized buses run suspiciously close to Twitter headquarters. More protests, and more vitriol ensued.

Of course, in reality, Google's buses spare the highway a whole lot of traffic, and the atmosphere from countless tons of carbon emissions from what would otherwise be an extra few thousand cars on the highways every day. And suspicions about local government adding commuter lines to accommodate Twitter appear to be unfounded.

The deeper angst in San Francisco appears to be over the way each new tech initial public offering creates another few thousand millionaires who want to buy apartments, jacking up the real estate prices for everyone else. But even this local economics issue seems unlikely to be motivating such widespread disdain for tech business. Besides, there are a number of corporations with much worse records of displacing locals or hurting business than the new tech giants.

No, I think the reason these young corporations are getting so much pushback is that they were once seen as the upstarts -- as the companies on the people's side of things. Digital technology was supposed to disrupt business as usual, create new opportunities for both self-expression and small business, and -- perhaps most of all -- change the very nature of the corporation and its relationship to real people and places. They're being held to a higher standard than companies of previous generations.

Now that these little garage businesses are some of the biggest companies in the world, it's a whole lot harder for them to exhibit the qualities that once made them the darlings of the culture and counterculture alike. Yes, digital companies are being held to a higher standard than companies of previous generations. But this is largely because we all understand that they are building the infrastructure in which our economics, culture and perhaps even a whole lot of human consciousness will take place.

That's why they have to pay more attention to communicating their intentions than might otherwise seem justified. Steve Jobs was famous for keeping great secrets, but Apple is largely a consumer electronics firm. We like being surprised about the features on our next phone.

A company such as Google can't be as secretive when it purchases a military robotics firm. Without clear messaging about the reasons for such acquisitions, the public mind reels, particularly in the wake of National Security Agency disclosures, jobs lost to automation and movies from "Her" to "Transcendence."

Instead of balking at our widespread suspicions, the leaders of Silicon Valley must begin communicating honestly and effectively about what they hope and dream for. If people are scared of Google's Glass, of Facebook's purchase of a virtual reality company or of Twitter's use of big data, then it's up to those companies to explain loud and clear how these developments will serve us all.

For once, protecting strategy secrets has to take a back seat to clear communications. If these companies really are building the world we're all going to be living in, they have to let us in on their plans. Otherwise, we're going to feel like we've been left off the bus.

]]>Present Shock and the VC Mindset at DLDhttp://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2014/5/15/present-shock-and-the-vc-mindset-at-dld.htmlDouglas Rushkoff2014-05-15T22:30:02Z2014-05-15T22:30:02ZI finally got to speak at a DLD, and ended up applying the Present Shock concept to the rushed, innovation-killing, and ultimately anti-human nature of the digital economy.

]]>Dark Rye does Present Shockhttp://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2014/4/20/dark-rye-does-present-shock.htmlDouglas Rushkoff2014-04-20T16:44:22Z2014-04-20T16:44:22ZThis artfully-produced little film about me and Present Shock just came out from Dark Rye, a film series funded by Whole Foods. I have trouble looking at it, myself, but that might just be because it's me on the screen, looking into lens most of the time. The movie recreates the experience of present shock, which is probably why it feels a bit frenetic to me. But I have shown it to my friends, who agree that it does well communicate the concepts of the book - and in just a few minutes at that.

The filmmaker, Angus Cann, is super bright, and I encourage you to check out some of his other work on the site. Here's a link to the whole Rushkoff section:

]]>Is Mike Judge's 'Silicon Valley' the End of Startup Mania?http://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2014/4/16/is-mike-judges-silicon-valley-the-end-of-startup-mania.htmlDouglas Rushkoff2014-04-16T17:47:08Z2014-04-16T17:47:08ZThis post originally appeared in RushkoffMail. Subscribe here.

The simple cartoon, originally a short segment on late-night Liquid Television, consisted mostly of two teenage boys watching rock videos, making commentary about them, and then rejecting them: "this sucks, change it.” For me, the show was armchair media criticism - a lesson in deconstructing television. Where a rock video used to be able to lure a teenage boy with sexual imagery, it was a whole lot harder to fall into the spell with Beavis shouting “nice set!” No, it may not have been the sophisticated analysis of McLuhan, but it was at least as alienating an effect as Bertolt Brecht.

And MTV’s ratings went down, along with the ability of the network to pass off advertising as programming.

After watching Judge’s latest effort, a live-action tech industry satire on HBO called 'Silicon Valley,' I began to wonder if he might deflate another value-challenged culture as effectively as he took down MTV. It’s a buddy show along the lines of Entourage, except the lead is a geeky, horny developer instead of a handsome, horny movie star. But the potential brilliance of the series lies in Judge’s only slight exaggerations of the hypocrisy underlying the digital startup landscape: these are people claiming to be saving the world, when they’re really just the latest generation of desperate yuppies chasing capital and, in turn, reinforcing Wall Street’s monopoly over our society. Digital business is revolutionary only in the way it camouflages business as usual.

And while I’m pondering all this, the NASDAQ stock exchange has its worst decline since 2011 or maybe before, led down by the poster children of Silicon Valley excess: Facebook, Twitter, Tesla. Coincidence? Not really. For while there may be no direct cause and effect between the airing of a TV show and the immediate slide of the valuation of the companies satires, there is a sea change occurring.

It was significant enough for Silicon Valley hero billionaire Elon Musk, founder of Paypal and Tesla, to immediately criticize the program: “I really feel like MikeJudge has never been to Burning Man, which is Silicon Valley. If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it.” That Musk would credit Silicon Valley for Burning Man is kind of like crediting the Conquistadors for Quetzalcoatl - but that’s besides the point. What’s interesting is that he doth protest too much, which just underscores for me how important public perception is to an economic model based on hype.

Anyway, I’ll be glad to see the hype fade, as it has before, leaving those who truly love the possibilities of digital technology to keep on developing it - without the pressures of venture capital firms and their requirement to achieve spectacular results instead of good, sustainable ones.

]]>Shareable.com - Democracy: There's an App for Thathttp://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2014/3/24/shareablecom-democracy-theres-an-app-for-that.htmlDouglas Rushkoff2014-03-24T18:08:50Z2014-03-24T18:08:50ZThe best thing about Occupy Wall St. wasn't what it argued politically or accomplished legislatively, but what it modeled for us: a new way of engaging with issues, resolving conflict, and reaching consensus. It was a style of engagement that seemed like it could only happen in person, between young people willing to sit in a cold park all night until they could come to an agreement over an issue.

But now, a small collective in New Zealand has developed a digital platform through which any group - large or small, local or global - can take a page from the Occupier’s handbook. It’s called Loomio, and it’s already being used by civic activists in Ukraine, thousands of direct democracy advocates in Greece, municipalities in England, foundations, and credit unions.

It’s all based on what the Occupy movement called the General Assembly, an alternative to parliamentary procedure, borrowed from the Ancient Greek senate. It’s a deceptively simple (and easily satirized) process where the crowd waves their hands to indicate their approval or level of objection to a proposal. It may look a little silly, but it proved a valid or even superior method for forging consensus than traditional debate, where one side wins and the other, well, loses.

The problem with the general assembly, like representative democracy, is that it’s quite limited in scale. You can only have so many people engaging with one another, blocking motions, and making arguments. Plus, it just has to happen in person.

Well, now there’s an app for that. The first time I saw it in beta, I asked if I could be an advisor to the non-profit collective working on it. (They agreed.) And this week, they’re finally releasing the application and doing a Kickstarter campaign to develop it further.

Amazingly, there exists no great tool online for groups to make decisions. There are plenty of platforms on which to collaborate or work together. But the most complicated decisions most of us have made online deal with the time or location of a meeting.

The Loomio application lets members of a group offer proposals, discuss their merits, make changes, and register their feelings all along the way. By entering into this process in good faith, even large groups can steer towards outcomes that may not be perfect for everyone, but make the fewest people unhappy - and nobody too very upset.

It’s not much more than a pie graph with four buttons, but its simplicity (and privacy) is getting it positive attention from a broad cross section of people across the globe—from remote villages in India, community hospitals in Vietnam, to government departments and early childhood education centers. Even the Wellington City Council that 12 months previously had been trying to evict Loomio’s developers from the public square, is now using Loomio to collaborate with citizens in developing policy.

I can only wonder what would have happened if the recent controversy over installing a synthetic football field at the high school in my community had been conducted on platform like Loomio instead of at contentious town hall debates. I know people who still aren’t on speaking terms as a result of our all-or-nothing, winner-takes-all, scorched earth battle.

Likewise, as I ponder the inadequacy of a two-party political system hatched in the 1700’s, especially when its polarities are magnified by the spin cycle of 21st Century media and markets. What was supposed to be a way of generating multifaceted solutions has devolved into intransigence and extremism.

Debate itself is a form of combat, not an approach to reaching an agreement. It’s geared toward creating no greater number of winners than losers. That’s not what democracy was supposed to be about. As one of Loomio’s founders, Ben Knight explains, “Democracy is about collaboration - people coming together and making decisions. Democracy is not a scarce resource - it doesn’t need to be this abstract thing that we only get access to once every 4 years, managed by a professional class far away. With the right tools, it can be a skill that we practice together every day, in our schools, our workplaces and our communities.”

While Loomio might not replace representative democracy - nor should we necessarily want it to - it may take some of the pressure off our democratic institutions by giving people the ability to make a whole lot of decisions for themselves, and with one another.

]]>Testament: New Price, Old Interviewhttp://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2014/3/15/testament-new-price-old-interview.htmlDouglas Rushkoff2014-03-15T13:30:32Z2014-03-15T13:30:32ZJeff Newelt dug up this interview for Write Now! back in 2007, as a way of celebrating the release of Testament and its new discounted $12.99 pricetag for the whole series.

Jeff's a good friend, so the conversation goes deeper than most. We talk about the comics writers and artists who influenced me while I was writing Testament, and the challenge of pitching stories as lurid as the Bible to modern-day publishers.

Interestingly, we spend a good deal of time talking about whether the Bible stories I "futurize" in Testament were still truly relevant to a 2007 audience. Little did we know that the markets were about to crash, and that cryptocurrency and deep government surveillance would become real phenomena at the center of the public conversation.

Of course, that Biblical stories are timeless is actually the point. It's not just a portal to the past, but to the future and maybe more importantly, the present.